“No Fluff, Just Stuff” Requests?

By Robert Fischer | Published: September 1, 2009

The “No Fluff, Just Stuff” shows have been great fun, and Jay (the organizer) has asked me to come up with additional topics. Although Grails and concurrency are great topics, they’re also well-covered by other people on the tour. In talking to people at the RTP show, Ivy and Gant were brought up. What kind of things are people interested in hearing from me?

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  • John Stoneham

    Gant and Ivy would both be nice. I am currently struggling to learn how to use Gant more effectively than just a prettier Ant, and getting bitten by the variable resolution rules. Ivy, as a recovering Maven user, seems like it may be a great way to salvage a lot of the juice from Maven and remove some of the pain. (Though after a long conversation with Christian Gruber, I am intrigued at what may be coming in Maven 3!)

    In the spirit of your Grails Persistence book, I’m personally interested in a ‘tuning the hell out of your Grails persistence layer, tools and tips’ session because my current project is getting beaten up by this. Perhaps some discussion of when to turn to raw Hibernate, etc. and what to look at – if you’re like me, Scott Leberknight’s Hibernate talk is difficult because I don’t spend enough time writing actual Hibernate code (Grails hides it all), so it’s hard to know where to start or where to plug in.

    Writing Eclipse plugins in Scala/Clojure/Ruby would be a fun diversion. Or something on Cuke4Duke, which I’m just getting into since encountering it last week at Agile 2009. I don’t know where your interests lie.

  • http://hamletdarcy.blogspot.com Hamlet D’Arcy

    Ivy yes, Gant no. Having seen several 1.5 hour Gant talks, there really isn’t much to show people if they know Ant. It’d be much better to do 1.5 hours on Gradle, which is much more of a game changer. Any talk on Gant is going to pretty much be a talk on Ant with an introduction to Groovy.

  • http://www.smokejumperit.com Robert Fischer

    I’ve got a GORM talk which I might evolve into a tuning-heavy talk. I’ve gotten that feedback quite a bit.

    When I was looking over Gant and trying to envision a talk, it became pretty clear that one really has to broaden the scope to include a quick tutorial on writing tools and target sets. Otherwise, there just isn’t enough there if you assume your audience knows Ant already.

    I floated the idea of Gradle a couple of times, but the people I talked to were extremely gunshy about adopting a new build framework thanks to historical issues with Maven (burnt by Maven 1 or heavily vested in Maven 2). So while Gant might be able to “slip in” to replace Ant, Gradle would face adoption issues. Also, I know Gant a lot better than I know Gradle.

    I might do a general “dependency and release management stunts you’re probably not using” talk, though, with the punchline being Gradle.

  • http://hamletdarcy.blogspot.com Hamlet D’Arcy

    Three years ago, I wonder how the idea of a Groovy talk was received? Weren’t most people gunshy about adopting a new language? Honestly, I think No Fluff _needs_ more talks like Gradle. Some people I know have said No Fluff doesn’t change enough year-to-year and that the JVM ecosystem doesn’t change enough year-to-year. Gradle is a project that is quite different from Maven/Ant and deserves to receive a lot more attention.

  • Brian

    My request: “Why You Should Learn Ocaml” :-)

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